Futures from Nature - Hardcover

Gee, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765318059 ISBN 13: 9780765318053

Publisher: Tor Books, 2007

Synopsis

Here are 100 very short stories on the subject of the future and what it might be like. The authors include scientists, journalists, and many of the most famous SF writers in the world. Futures from Nature includes everything from satires and vignettes to compressed stories and fictional book reviews, science articles, and journalism, in eight-hundred word modules. All of them are entertaining and as a group they are a startling repository of ideas and attitudes about the future.

 

Appearing in book form fo the first time, these one hundred pieces were originally published in the great science journal, Nature, between 1999 and 2006, as one-page features. That proved very popular with the readers of the journal. This is a unique book, by scientists and writers, of interest to any reader who might like to speculate about the future.

 

With stories from:

Arthur C. Clarke; Bruce Sterling; Charles Stross; Cory Doctorow; Greg Bear; Gregory Benford; Oliver Morton; Ian Macleod; Rudy Rucker; Greg Egan; Stephan Baxter; Barrington J. Bayley; Brian Stableford; Frederik Pohl; Vernor Vinge; Nancy Kress, Michael Moorcock, Vonda N. McIntyr; Kim Stanley Robinson; John M. Ford; and eighty more.

About this title

About the Author

Henry Gee was born in London in 1962. In due course he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Leeds, and his Ph. D. at the University of Cambridge. In 1987 he joined the staff of Nature, the international science magazine. He is the author of The Science of Middle Earth, Jacob's Ladder, In Search of Deep Time and (with Luis V. Rey) A Field Guide to Dinosaurs. The Futures SF column in Nature, which he devised, garnered Nature the award of Best SF Publisher from the European Science Fiction Society. Henry Gee has recently moved to the seaside town of Cromer in Norfolk, where he lives with his wife, two children, and numerous pets.

Reviews

Starred Review. Hard SF fans should revel in Gee's unusual anthology of 100 speculative miniatures created by scientists, journalists and top SF authors worldwide and originally published as recent one-page features in the science journal Nature. Each vignette centers on a wondrous or devastating or simply mind-boggling what if, carried to an unsettlingly original logical conclusion—or left spinning in an extraterrestrial mental orbit. A sampling of the treasures illustrates their remarkable range: Gregory Benford's poignant A Life with a Semisent explores the human need for love; Paul McCauley's Meat tackles the nasty human trick of twisting technology to immoral purposes; Robert Sawyer faces religion with the gobsmacking Abdication of Pope Mary III; and Ian Watson lets fly with his hilarious Nadia's Nectar, one of the best bathroom tales around. All in all, this is a perfect volume to awaken startling new thoughts on old SF themes, giant leaps into the future in delectably palatable tiny packages. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765318059
• ISBN 13: 9780765318053
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320